Microsoft Corporation
Distributed system that promotes task-machine affinity

Abstract:

A technique is described herein for allocating tasks within a distributed system. The distributed system includes plural computing devices. Each computing device, in turn, provides a bucket manager and at least one application instance. The bucket managers allocate work to the computing devices in units of buckets, in a manner governed by a set of application-specific initialization parameters. The bucket managers also perform their assignment function in cooperation with a separate storage and notification (S&N) system. The S&N system stores data nodes in a hierarchical data structure that reflect the assignment-related state of the distributed system. The S&N system also notifies the bucket managers upon changes in the data nodes. According to one provision, the bucket managers include logic that reduces expensive context changes when computing devices join and leave the distributed system.